Closed-toe shoes are required at all volunteer locations. We suggest you dress in layers to remain comfortable while working.

At our West location, we have a no jewelry policy. When you are in the packing areas, you will be asked to remove all jewelry. Clothes must be clean prior to handling food. All clothing should be appropriate for handling food and not have loose, dangling beads or other articles which can be a physical contaminant. Shirts should cover the shoulders and armpits (no tank tops) for volunteers directly handling exposed food. This applies to volunteers at our Brooklyn Park location.

Yes! Parking is available at both Brooklyn Park (in front of the building on the north side) and Maplewood (at the northwest and west sides of the building). Volunteer parking spaces are marked with flags. To ensure sufficient parking, we do recommend that you carpool when possible.

As a result of the donated food coming from different places, we cannot guarantee that the food hasn’t come in contact with certain food allergens. Unfortunately, we also can’t communicate what food products volunteers will pack until the start of the volunteer shift. For those with food allergies, we ask you exercise caution before signing up for a volunteer shift.

a) For overall safety, it is important that we have information about who is in our facility, particularly in emergency situations. b) We are upholding new protections around food defense (protecting the integrity of our food) which require us to have more conservative security measures. c) Your mailing address will allow us to keep you apprised of how volunteers like you, and others, are contributing to our work of ending hunger. d) We have 135,000 records in our volunteer management system. Collecting addresses will allow us to eliminate duplicate records which will make sure we can attribute your volunteer time correctly. e) Confirmation of address also helps us indicate that you’ve agreed to our volunteer liability waiver.

To learn about volunteering at your local food shelf, please contact the food shelf directly. To find your nearest food shelf, visit Hunger Solutions. For additional volunteer opportunities, Second Harvest Heartland has open shifts and events at our East (Maplewood) and West (Brooklyn Park) locations.

Scheduling and shifts

To ensure that you can reserve your first choice for date and time, we recommend registering for Brooklyn Park shifts one month in advance. For Maplewood shifts, we recommend you register three to four months in advance.

Group Volunteers

Yes. Please email all group members' names to volunteer@2harvest.org using this spreadsheet. Please ensure to include e-mail addresses and phone numbers as providing this information helps us distinguish volunteers from one antoher in our database.

We prefer that volunteers stay for the duration of the warehouse shifts, but we understand schedules sometimes don’t allow this. Please contact us if a member of your group needs to leave early/arrive late.